Forget about Bing and Yahoo

In web search, Google rules. That’s not an earth-shattering statement. But here’s one: forget Bing and Yahoo.

As an internet marketing company, our job is to get our clients ranked on search engines and keep them there. Each month we report back to our clients where they are ranking for the primary target keywords we use for their specific niche. But in all honestly, do we really care about rankings anywhere but Google.

Where Does Bing Rate?

I don’t use Bing and I am willing to bet you don’t either. So why keep paying attention to it? Yahoo now uses Bing results so we don’t even list them in reports anymore either and their market share only continues to slide. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft or some other company eventually buys them anyway. My question is: Who is searching on anything but Google? Do we care?

Despite the millions Microsoft has spent advertising Bing, it has still yet to gain more than a 15% market share. Next to Google’s massive 65% it’s no surprise where your marketing focus should be.

Who’s Using Bing?

Here’s my theory:

1. Non-savvy people on computers at home or work that just open up Internet Explorer because that’s all they know and Bing is the default search engine for them. (Internet Explorer accounts for 72% of Bing’s search queries.)
2. People that have MSN or Hotmail as their primary mail service and it defaults to Bing when they search.
   Since Yahoo results are technically Bing results you could say that Bing controls a 35% market share but again, I would argue that the people using these search engines are there because their email, browser, or computer defaulted them to it.

Do These Searchers Matter?

So do we care that these less savvy people are searching on engines that don’t matter as much? Could we extrapolate and say they are less educated computer users and we can ignore them? Probably not.

My advice for this is the same as it is for Facebook. Keep it in your mix but don’t spend a lot of time or energy there. The eyes are elsewhere as your focus should be.

Meanwhile, if you want to learn more about future trends in search behavior, why not just Google it?